Kerstin Baker-Ash

Coming Up...

Yeah, yeah. Promises, promises.

Trust me, if you had a full time job (which did not involve the tiniest bit of blogging), a mountain of actions and to-do lists and two conferences to prepare for, you'd be a little light in the blog updates. I'm not complaining - far from it. I like being busy, I like being kept on my toes. I just need to prioritize sometimes, and while I love writing... hey, my $2.16 waiting for me in AdSense won't pay the mortgage (or for my latté habit).

SMX was great - I had a really nice time catching up with old and new friends, and not-so-secretly believe that the panel I was on with Kate Morris and Guy Levine was the most entertaining and informative. Takeaways from the conference (I only attended the first day because of work commitments) were a push to get search at the front of mind of clients (even from a research perspective), a desire never to be in a sales pitch or tool demo at any conference (I was in two), and that nitty gritty search marketing techniques are still the way to go for meaningful testing and actionable results. 

What's next for me? SES Toronto, of course. I'll be in town from Sunday afternoon, so feel free to suggest coffee (remember the latté habit discussed above), geeking out about search or the best place for dumpling soup in Chinatown (there's only one, and it's splendiferous). I know I've rabbited on about a sneak peek for my panel on SES, so keep your eyes peeled this week for a preview.

What Did I Miss?

I've been operating outside the blogosphere for a while. Holiday, catching up at work and getting over what seems to be a rather protracted case of jet lag has consumed every waking moment for the last couple of weeks. I won't go into a long holiday recap - it was fabulous, I saw my family, danced the hora at my friend's wedding and drove (rather, James drove) over 3200 miles from Toronto to Philadelphia to Orlando and back again. I ate at a haunted restaurant in Savannah, nearly tossed my cookies on a centrifuge ride at Epcot and drove through Louisville, Kentucky on Derby Day (no Mint Juleps for me).

It looks like a lot of meaty search news happened while I've been away or under a two-week-big pile of work. Wolfram Alpha is launching on the 18th of May. Google presented Search Options and Wonderwheel. Twitter caused some geek-rage when it changed the way we see @replies.

On a work-personal note, I'm up to bat for two conferences in the next four weeks; SMX London, where I'll be speaking about writing killer search ads and landing pages, and SES Toronto, talking about internationalizing your campaigns and sites. In the next day or so, I'll go more in depth about what you can expect from the session, as well as pointers to my awesome fellow presenters' teaser trailers. I'm über-excited (as usual), because the calibre of conferences is definitely on the rise, and I get to share a panel with people I completely look up to (without the girl-crush element) in the industry.

Back to the grind, work and presentations to crack on with!